What Went Wrong at St. Mark’s Bookshop

After thirty-eight years, four locations, and numerous efforts to save it, St. Mark’s Bookshop as we know it is going out of business. This week, friends dropped by to pay their respects, while bargain hunters streamed in to pick the shelves clean.Credit PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY ADA CALHOUN

A few days ago, a fifty-per-cent-off clearance-sale sign appeared in the window of St. Mark’s Bookshop’s modest storefront on East Third Street, and this time it is really the end. The long-struggling store owes as much as seventy thousand dollars in back rent to the city, plus significant sums to publishers and wholesale distributors. According to the New York State Department of Tax and Finance, it faces an open warrant due to almost thirty-five thousand dollars of unpaid sales tax. Bob Contant, the store’s only remaining owner, told me that the business’s accounts have been frozen thanks to a creditor’s lawsuit; an investor who came on briefly as C.F.O. has also sued the store. The local landlord and longtime St. Marks Place resident Charles Fitzgerald has cooked up a plan to start a new bookshop in the space, which he says would be viable if investors were willing to put up two hundred thousand dollars. Even if that plan comes to fruition, though, St. Mark’s Bookshop as we know it is officially going out of business. This week, friends dropped by to pay their respects, while bargain hunters streamed in to pick the shelves clean.

In a neighborhood that is wearily familiar with the closing of local fixtures (two recent blows were Sounds record store and De Robertis pastry shop), the demise of St. Mark’s Bookshop stands out as painfully, publicly prolonged—one former employee I spoke to compared it to “watching a puddle evaporate.” Founded at 13 St. Marks Place in 1977 by Contant, Terry McCoy, and three other men, the store in its heyday was a literary headquarters for punks, and an outpost for St. Mark’s Poetry Project poets. With its teeming critical theory and poetry sections, international-magazine and small-press offerings, and raft of chapbook consignments, the store was a polished jewel in the scuzzy crown of the East Village, the place where countless aspiring artists bought their first books by Bukowski or Ginsberg or Sartre. Smart if sometimes snooty clerks could talk your ear off about Roland Barthes; the zine collection was impeccably curated. Susan Willmarth, who worked at the store from 1988 to 2007, told me, “St. Mark’s did so well because it was on the Lower East Side when the Lower East Side became a real special place.”

By the late eighties, the store was facing financial and managerial troubles. Three of the founders left the business one by one, leaving only McCoy and Contant, a kind of erudite Abbott and Costello in jeans and black sneakers, who gained a reputation for caring more about the life of the mind than about the particulars of running a business. In 1987, the store expanded to a space twice the size across the street, at 12 St. Marks Place, a building owned by Fitzgerald. They were undercapitalized for the move, and overestimated how much business they would do in the larger space. In 1989, on the brink of closure, they were bailed out by the publisher Bob Rodale, who put up two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and helped them negotiate with their creditors. Soon after, the shop was offered a fifteen-year lease by Cooper Union college at a below-market rate, in the ground floor of a dorm on Ninth Street and Third Avenue. For a time, St. Mark’s thrived in this new space and enjoyed another golden era, even outlasting the Barnes & Noble that stood at Astor Place from 1994 to 2007. But the 2008 economic crash sent the store back into turmoil. Since then various efforts to save the store have been made, attracting online donations and celebrity supporters like Salman Rushdie and Patti Smith. In 2011, after months of negotiation and a petition that garnered forty-four thousand signatures, Cooper Union agreed to reduce the rent. But none of it was enough to right the store’s finances.

In 2014, St. Mark’s moved to its fourth and current home, in a smaller city-owned storefront, where the rent was a quarter of what it had been at Cooper. An architecture firm renovated the store pro bono. But in this leaner new space the business has continued to limp along. Those customers willing to make the trek over to Avenue A have often discovered the store with half-empty shelves and a dauntingly gloomy atmosphere. The Utah writer Christian Harrison, who in 2014 conducted a twenty-three-stop bookstore crawl of New York City, told me that St. Mark’s was the low point of his tour. “The man looked at me like I’d walked in on them planning a murder, and so I made my way to the far corner of the bookstore,” he said. “It’s not a large space, so I just tried to be very concentrated on browsing.” Benjamin George Friedman, who worked at the store between 1995 and 2014, told me, “You see a lot of complaining about how rude people were there. But in their defense it was a very demoralizing place to be. It was all day long having people come up to you wanting to talk about the situation—saying, basically, ‘So, I hear you’re dying of cancer.’ ”

I’ve been buying books at St. Mark’s Bookshop since I was a kid growing up a block away, in the eighties and nineties. The store is where, at the age of fourteen, I found the zine “The 11th St. Ruse,” which led to my pen-pal correspondence with its editor, R. L. S., also known as the poet Sparrow, whom I finally met in person at a reading just last week, after writing letters for a quarter century. (“We should meet every twenty-five years,” he said.) I’m now thirty-nine, and bring my son in from Brooklyn to visit his grandparents, who still live in the same top-floor walkup. In November, 2015, I published a book, “St. Marks Is Dead,” about the history of the street, which Bob Contant told me in December was the store’s No. 1 best-seller. This was particularly gratifying given that the shop had declined to carry an earnest zine I’d offered them back in 1991.

And yet, I have complicated feelings about the bookstore’s closing. Champions of St. Mark’s remind us that it is one of the last living vestiges of the East Village’s punk history, a symbol of an older era of New York City life when cabs wouldn’t go east of Avenue A and apartments with hardwood floors could be rented for two hundred dollars a month. The bookshop has been a neighborhood standby for thirty-eight years, standing sentinel as generations of residents, not to mention full-fledged riots, passed before their windows. It is deeply depressing to see it fail, just as it was to see the closure of the nearby used bookstore Tompkins Square Books a decade ago. (A discarded shelf from that store, plucked from the curb, still stands in my apartment.)

But St. Mark’s Bookshop has also seemed frustratingly unwilling to seek out new streams of revenue. The former employees I’ve spoken to have mentioned various innovations that were floated over the years by friends of the store: offering deeper discounts, as the thriving Strand does; investing in advertising, or opening an in-store café like McNally Jackson. (“Cafés are an enormous headache,” Contant told me.) There was a push at some point to host more regular events, but Contant says that they weren’t a moneymaker. When I asked him about the possibility of selling used books, which tend to have more generous profit margins than new ones, he said, “Strand is a few blocks away, and who wants to compete against them there? It’s a whole different kind of business.”

About a year ago, McCoy stopped taking a salary and, to avoid being liable for the lease, let Contant buy him out for a dollar. Leonine with a mane of wavy white hair, Contant has been the iron will keeping the store alive; he never stopped believing its original mission and model. And yet he seems to have grown contemptuous of the neighborhood he’s fought so hard to remain a part of. When a member of the Mayor’s tourism office asked me last year to be interviewed for a video about the East Village, I suggested that we do the taping at the bookshop, which was struggling to attract customers at its new location. When the camera rolled, I talked up the bookstore. Then the interviewer asked Contant a question, and he offered a disillusioned rant about how the Village used to be cool. I was disappointed that he hadn’t taken the opportunity to plug his business and the neighborhood (his comments never made it into the final video), but I wasn’t surprised. When I’d interviewed him for my book, in 2013, he’d expressed a similar sentiment:

It’s like any tourist trap now, unfortunately. . . . This used to be a mecca for people getting started in the arts. In 1975, I lived on St. Marks with four rooms and a fireplace for a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. We were getting two-fifty an hour. You could afford your own apartment. There were cheap restaurants. You could go on a date. There wasn’t a stigma about being poor. Everybody was poor. The neighborhood was an exciting place to live.

Of course, complaining about an aging bohemian being grouchy is like criticizing the sun for being bright. Contant’s attitude is very St. Marks Place, and very New York. (As I mention in my book, in 1811 people complained that the street grid had killed the city.) But it’s not an ideal attitude for a small-business owner who badly needs to lure investors or court new customers.

To me, the greatest tragedy of the store’s end is not that the neighborhood is losing another beloved longtime business, and a piece of its living history, but that Contant and McCoy, who are now both in their seventies, are losing, under dismal circumstances, the jobs they’ve held for nearly four decades. McCoy plans to retire and spend his days going to museums and movies. (“My wife likes it when I get out of the house,” he told me.) But Contant told me he’s worried that he and his wife will have to move in with family members, and is living in fear that he will be held personally liable for some portion of the store’s debt. Discussing the closing, his eyes filled with tears. “It’s been half my lifetime,” he said. “Terry said once that it was a calling; I think that sums it up.”